Mechanical Design And Machines Design

All the design, source files, assembly details, and the full documentation are on the Fab Lab Egypt project page, Check it out!

What’s Going On?

For someone who loves to shoot some random hobbyist videos, it’s somehow expensive to buy a motorized camera slider. So, I built my own. In this tutorial, we will go through each step to build your own Bluetooth controlled motorized camera slider.

Project Overview

Today we will build a motorized camera slider that we can control it wirelessly over Bluetooth from a custom-made android mobile app. I used the “MIT App inventor” tool to make the app which gives us the ability to control a lot of stuff like the slider movement speed, traveling distance, acceleration/deceleration rate and a lot more. The mobile app is very robust, inside the app you can set your camera slider length which you are using. which means, you are free to build your actual camera slider with any length up to 10 meters without worrying about the app.

CAD And 3d Modeling

We used Fusion360 to design the camera slider, we chose to use a very well known, easy to find mechanical components that you can buy easily from almost any online or offline store no matter where you live.

All the design, source files and assembly details are on the Fab Lab Egypt project page, Check it out!

Logic, Electronics, and PCB Design

To control the camera slider I used an Arduino UNO board to maintain the logic of the camera slider, A4988 stepper motor driver to control the NEMA 17 stepper motor, and an HC-05 Bluetooth module to establish wireless communication between the mobile app and the camera slider.

We chose to work with Arduino UNO specifically to make the project easy and makeable for as many hobbyists and makers as we can. Also, we designed a custom Arduino shield for the camera slider to make it robust and solid without worrying about the flying jumper wires.

Mobile App And Wireless Control

We used the MIT App inventor tool to make an Android mobile app to control the camera slider through it.

And here’s a picture describes the feature of the mobile app.

If you wanna know more details about the project and the full project source files. Please check it in the Fab Lab Egypt Page.